The Secrets of the Forgotten 1965 Classic “Talking to Women”

In 1964, about once a month, the novelist and screenwriter Nell Dunn
invited a friend to her house, got out her tape recorder, opened a
bottle of wine, and starting asking questions. The result was “Talking
to Women,” a short book of the edited transcripts of conversations that
Dunn had with nine of her friends, which was published in 1965 and went
out of print soon after. As Dunn, who is now eighty, told me this
spring, the book “wasn’t a particular success or anything.” And yet now
and again it resurfaces. Several friends have recommended it to me in
the past two years, including one, the kind who listens to me over a
bottle of wine, who gave me a copy eighteen months ago, on hearing I was
getting a divorce. I was thirty-two, wanting a different life, and still
uncertain of what that might be.

Some of the women who talk in the book—Pauline Boty, Edna O’Brien, Ann
Quin—are now well-known writers and artists; others—Kathy Collier, Emma
Charlton, Frances Chadwicke—were just friends of Dunn, who, at the time
of recording these conversations, was twenty-eight, and living with her
husband, the writer Jeremy Sandford, and their three sons, in Battersea,
London. The women in the book are married and single, childless and
pregnant, working and not working, but, as Dunn puts it in the preface,
quoting “Daniel Deronda,” all of them “have severed themselves from some
of the conventional forms of living and thinking, in trying to find what
for them are the ‘private joys of life.’ ” Pauline, a Pop artist, speaks first, in a
relaxed nineteen-sixties argot—men who find it hard to talk to women are
“square” and “purple
hearts” are better than
Benzedrine. She describes an affair with a married man, the way it
ended, her subsequent marriage to a man ten days after meeting him, and
her new pregnancy (“an
accident I’m secretly more pleased about . . . than I could ever
admit”). The swiftness of the
coupling could be from the eighteenth century but the reasoning is
entirely of the twenty-first: Pauline marries posthaste because “he was
the first man I could really talk very freely to.” (Ali Smith, who mentions her debt to “Talking to
Women” in the acknowledgements of her new novel, “Autumn,” picks up on
this sentiment too: “She'd married her husband because he liked women,
he knew they weren't things.”)

“Talking to Women” shares something with Linda Rosenkrantz’s “Talk,”
which was written from tape recordings made on the beach in East Hampton
in 1965, but Rosenkrantz’s
novel is more skeptical about female friendship, more psychoanalytic in
tone. Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?”—in which one female
friendship is chronicled in long conversations about art and love—is
perhaps closer to the spirit of Dunn’s book. But, more than either those
books, “Talking to Women” gives its readers the sense that they're
eavesdropping. The conversations are often rambling and sometimes
boring—before some shard of wisdom or bizarre revelation surges up out
of nowhere. Edna is “very frightened” of having her nipples
touched. Pauline used to think she had an “ugly cunt.” Antonia regrets being remote from her
mother. Suna Portman has known since the age of five that she didn’t want to be buried in a
coffin when she died. At one point in their conversation, Nell asks Ann, “Do you find things erotic,
are you aware of it?” Ann responds, “Yes, I think so, inasmuch as the
other day for instance there was someone poking their finger in a sort
of round ashtray, putting their finger, jabbing it in and out for about
half an hour.”

Dunn, who was born in London in 1936, to a baronet and a lady, spent the years before the
publication of her first story collection, “Up the Junction,” working in
a sweets factory. In the
book, we catch her asking the same question to different people,
slightly modifying her wording each time; she knows, even if we don’t
always, whether she’s talking to an heiress or a factory worker. We see
how she coaxes out each one of her friends, knowing when to make
confessions herself and when to retreat. There’s an atmosphere of
intense intimacy: Emma doesn’t have to explain to Nell who Peter
is, and Nell asks questions like “What does passion mean to you?” without warning. The conversations are
revealing about the time just before second-wave feminism; the women
complain about men’s faithlessness and about having to do the dishes
with a kind of weary acceptance. Nell thinks it pointless to cook unless
someone you love is going to eat the meal; Antonia says she “dedicates my life to love,
really, to loving somebody” and that work is just something to fall back
on. At the same time, the book feels contemporary: as each conversation progresses, it becomes
more and more about the problems of creative work, especially of finding
the time to listen to your own thoughts and set them down.

I started to like the fact that everyone in the book contradicted
herself at least once; it’s because these portraits are messy that you
feel like the women are talking to you. “I’d like to be able to say what
I really feel but I feel it’s impossible, and what you feel is often a
paradox—two opposites at the same time sort of thing,” Boty says at one point. The women
do agree, however, on the necessity of talking, along with the
difficulty of it. “I started lying because I was unable to tell people
certain things,” Nell says; in fact, feeling that it is impossible to
say certain things at certain moments, she suggests, might be the most
English of all maladies. With Ann, she wonders whether promiscuity comes
not from being a moral failure but “a sort of wild thing of trying to
communicate.”

People often comment on the talkiness of contemporary life, in which
every thought is tweeted and crisis posted on Facebook. But while I was
married I found it difficult to talk the way these women do. It was as
if the gold ring I wore indicated to the world, or to myself, that I was
done with the kind of freewheeling discussion that single women have
about life. “Talking to Women” seemed to have been born of a similar
frustration; it’s a book that makes plain that an excuse—a book to be
written, a divorcée to be soothed—is often needed for such conversations
to happen.

At the heart of the project is a single voice, more or less unsure of
itself, more or less in crisis. “I didn’t have clarity about myself,
which is one of the reasons I did the book,” Dunn told me recently, when
I spoke to her in the pink and yellow kitchen at the back of her
terraced house in Fulham, London. She rested a brogued foot elegantly on
her knee as she spoke. “Because I felt so lost, I wanted to know how
other people were doing, and most of them were equally lost, really,”
she said. She separated from Sandford in 1971; six years later, Dunn met
the American computer mathematician Dan Oestreicher. They spent every
night together until his death, in 2009, but lived in separate houses.
Dunn describes the book as “a feminist project because it’s about women,
and about women counting, and about women being interesting.” I saw the
book as feminist, too, for the way it insisted on nothing other than the
complexity of sentiment, and seemed to expand the possibilities for
women.

For Dunn, “Talking to Women” was the beginning of a lifelong effort; for
the past thirty-five years, she has been a member of a women’s group run
by a therapist. “There’s only six women in it, and so we just explore
what’s happening in each of our lives, really, in what feels like a very
safe place with a confidentiality clause,” she explained. “I want to be
in touch as myself, not as any constructed thing, not as any
interviewer, just present and there.” Dunn wanted to hear about how I’d
found the book, about my divorce. We wondered aloud about what might
stop women from talking openly; she said she thought women sometimes
found it hard to be honest about their failings. “And they can very
easily get into a smug place. Does that mean anything to you?” I said it
did. “And that is a closer-downer.” I agreed; all sorts of conversations
became possible when I told people my life wasn’t what it seemed. “And
yet it should be so simple to love someone and take it in turns to make
the supper or whatever,” Dunn went on. “But it’s not. It’s not.” I’d
come to interview Dunn, and here I was just talking to her.